Super Nintendo, NES & GameBoy tomfoolery;

Today we'll take a (brief) look at a Gameboy game that reminds my of the FIRST Gameboy game I discussed: a mild platformer featuring an over-hyped character. But instead of being about a sumo wrestler, this game features...

Sweaty; indeed. Muscley? Sure! Hideous grimace, terrifying beast over his shoulder -- all this and more. But as we've seen in the past, a game's cover art and its in-game representations don't always line up.

So let's see: is our grayscale Greystoke* some kind of feral Fabio once you turn on his video game?

*: zing!

That'd be a big Negatory, good buddy.

Our impression of Mr. Tarzan has gone from Frank Frazetta to TV's Frank in no time.

Ok, but what monkey-shines does our vine-swingin' hero get up to?

...would you believe, "Fetch-Quest"?

explore, gather all items, take them to the (insert NPC here) and back (sometimes), then go to the next level.

But worst of all -- they screwed up his vine-swinging!

Ok, he's no Bionic Commando (maybe not even Pitfall Harry), but Tarzan can do some nifty swingin' on any dangling vines.

But the first time I tried to play this game, I could only find about 60% of the flowers-to-be-fetched. After eventually losing all my lives due to the (needlessly short) timer running out, I stopped playing.

But when I came back later, I realized that...

if you correctly press the D-pad in the opposite direction of your swings to reduce your momentum,

...once you've stopped swinging, you can start climbing.

The real problem with this is, despite the expected mediocre swinging physics, Tarzan violates several of Newton's laws of motion:

when he grabs onto one of the dangling vines, he almost always starts swinging back and forth...and will CONTINUE swinging back and forth indefinitely. Even though half the time you'd rather it stop so you can climb it.

So, let me read that part back again:

You've got to explore every corner of the level to gather all 10-15 fetch-quest items,

your timer is so short that sometimes you barely have enough time to get across the level and back, let alone explore the level for the first time, or miss a jump/swing and have to try again.

and, every time you want to climb a dangling vine, you have to fight with the game's pendulum mechanics to try to stop swaying.

They should have at least programmed the "down" button to be an "automatically reduce your swinging momentum" command. If they did that, then poor Tarzan could reliably stop his wacky vine shenanigans and get to climbing.